Food for Thought

Food for Thought: The Language Police and the Quesadilla

Thanks, AWAD newsletter, for alerting my attention to this article. What gave me pause was: "Hundreds of towns and half of the states, spending millions of taxpayer funds, have created legislation that makes English the official language."

This seems to me to be nothing more than a fear-based knee-jerk reaction to diversity. I suppose "hundreds of towns" still makes a minority of towns, but -half- the states? If this is true, it disgusts me. Sure, I think communication is necessary, and I taught English abroad for four years, ostensibly give kids tools to communicate with when they travelled abroad. However, as I was also representing a foreign culture, I had the opportunity to dialogue with and enrich the experiences of numerous people, including myself. By demanding one language as official, I believe we give ourselves an excuse to dismiss the diversity in the American immigrant culture, because then there is no pressure on us as an English-speaking majority to attempt to learn other languages or understand other cultures--all the responsibility for that falls on the immigrant. Failure to dialogue, then, really is failure to communicate.

Do I advocate teaching English in school? Yes, largely because most Americans can scarcely read or write in their native English to save their lives. Kids are graduating high school and moving on to college without any ability to write coherently, show critical thinking, or even show grammatical competence. In most places in the US, too, English is still necessary to succeed, but how does resisting bilingualism or multilingualism make Americans any less stupid?